Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn

Early fifteenth-century Paris saw a proliferation of "luxury manuscripts" whose luminous illustrations situate the reader as a spectator, and the authors take Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea as a prime example of the power of visual representation to shape the medieval reading experience. Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn's innovative study draws extensively on film theory and its notions of spectatorship to explore the ethical implication of viewing illustrated manuscripts for the medieval reader. Focusing on two different manuscripts of Othea, they suggest that premodern and postmodern cultures share a predilection for the cinematic arrangement of knowledge in a montage format in which meaning derives from unexpected juxtapositions. Pamela Sheingorn is professor of history, medieval studies, and theatre at The Graduate Center and Marilynn Desmond is professor of English, comparative literature, and women's studies at Binghamton University, SUNY.